Brighton and Hove Albion manager Chris Hughton has rejected claims that his side have an easier Championship run-in than Huddersfield Town or Newcastle United.

The Seagulls face relegation-threatened Blackburn Rovers, Birmingham City, Wolves, Bristol City and Wigan Athletic in their final eight matches of the season, with a trip to Norwich City the trickiest fixture to navigate.

But the ex-Newcastle boss is not planning for promotion yet as he knows anything can happen in the Championship - as was proven last time out when none of the top three managed to claim a victory.

On Brighton's favourable run-in, Hughton told the Argus: "It's something we are aware of, but we lost at Nottingham Forest and had a very tough game at Rotherham.

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"I've consistently said you can beat anybody - but you can lose to anybody as well.

"I anticipate that the sides around us are not going to lose too many games, so the onus has to be on ourselves looking after our own business and winning the amount of games we need to win."

With the bottom sides scrapping for survival, most teams prefer to play club in the middle of the table in the run-in - especially if they're gunning for promotion - and although Brighton face a number of relegation candidates, only Queens Park Rangers and Aston Villa fall under the mid-table category.

But Hughton disagrees, claiming all footballers want to win matches, no matter what they are fighting for.

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He said:"Once players get onto a football pitch they want to win games. There is a reason for players or a team to want to do well.

"It is always spoken about, that position with somebody in mid-table towards the end of the season, not going to go up, not going to go down.

"Are they going to fight any harder? Well, they are not going to fight any less and any thoughts of it not meaning so much for them, the other side of it is they are a team playing with a little bit more freedom, a little bit less pressure.

"So for as many reasons as there are that it should go a certain way, there will be as many for it to go another way.

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"I keep saying, in this division you can lose any game. Some of our good results have been against top teams. Probably one of our poorest performances was Brentford. We caught them at a time when they weren't in blistering form, but they were very good at the Amex.

"Probably most people would have had us down to win that one. Every game you have to go into it the same way and hope you can play well enough to get a good result.

"The moment you start thinking it's going to be an easier fixture than the last one, it's not."